Apple recently provided a sneak preview of its latest retail store in San Francisco’s Union Square ahead of its grand opening, and building permits shared with BuildZoom (via Patently Apple) have now revealed some of the costs involved in buying and prepping the store.

One of the largest property companies in the San Francisco Bay Area has said during an investor call that Apple is seeking around 800,000 square feet of space in the area to expand its car project. The WSJ quotes Hudson Pacific Properties CEO Victor Coleman talking about rising demand for space for car R&D in the area.

We’re seeing the Toyotas of the world, the Teslas of the world, BMWs, Mercedes. Ford now is out in the marketplace looking for space. I haven’t even mentioned the 400,000 square feet that Google’s looking to take down and the 800,000 square feet that Apple’s looking to take down for their autonomous cars as well.

That would be almost a third the size of the spaceship campus Apple is currently building, which is around 2.8M square feet …

Apple has officially announced that its new retail store in Marseille, France will open May 14 with the usual announcement on its website (via MacGeneration).

The new retail store, located at the Les Terrasses du Port shopping mall, is Apple’s 20th location in France. That’s if including the shop within Galeries Lafayette that it opened last year as one of several boutique locations for sales of the Apple Watch. Apple is also planning other retail stores for the country including a high-profile flagship location on Champs-Élysées in Paris.

It was back in the summer of last year when we first heard that Apple was planning to open its first major office space in San Francisco – a report today confirmed by Reuters.

Apple prepares to open chic new offices in San Francisco’s high-rent South of Market neighborhood, which has spawned scores of promising startups […] The iPhone maker’s new office will be in about 76,000 square feet of rented space at 235 Second St […]

The two floors Apple has leased in a building mostly occupied by CBS Interactive offer abundant open space and exposed ceilings, the preferred tech aesthetic.

The report suggests two possible reasons behind the decision to open the offices some 46 miles north of its Cupertino base …

It’s long been taken as read that high tech company salaries push up housing costs in the surrounding areas, but the WSJ commissioned home tracking company Zillow to provide some hard data. By tracking the increase in values of homes owned by Apple employees, it was able to prove that home values in those areas rose further and faster than in surrounding areas with similar demographics.

The piece notes that zoning laws and regulatory red tape also have a significant effect, by limiting the supply of housing at a time when demand is increasing, but the comparison does suggest that there is a direct link to tech companies like Apple.

Homes occupied by Apple workers are appreciating at 18% a year, compared with 11% for San Francisco as a whole and 12% for San Jose. Since iPhone sales launched in June 2007 [and stock values rose], the Zillow analysis found, the average difference between the median home value of Apple workers and San Jose workers has swelled to 20% from 13%.

The problem of lower-paid workers finding it hard to find housing within reasonable commuting distance of tech companies like Apple has been highlighted in the past. Apple took the decision back in March to hire the majority of its previously contracted security guards as staff, providing them with health insurance and retirement benefits. The company also arranged for its contracted shuttle bus workers to get an improved deal.

A series of new, high-resolution photos we have obtained show new features coming to the next-generation iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. First, comparisons of the front glass indicate that the new devices will sport upgraded front-facing FaceTime cameras with bigger sensors. The white phone in our images is a current iPhone 6, while the black plate is an iPhone 6S component. The presence of larger sensors likely indicates a higher pixel count up from the current 1.2 megapixels, as well as new functionality…